“Yeah, Significant Other was admitted on Friday evening, yeah, had emergency surgery on Saturday” “Oh really? Yeah I didn’t fell too well on Saturday either”
This is going to be another short one this week as things really haven't improved that much, oh and work was a bit busy yesterday morning when I usually do the shaping of this so I couldn't get much done. Damn sick people with their health needs.
I don't really want to go on about strikes, click here and here for details, because quite a lot of people seem not to agree with me but I would like to say support the workers because one day it might be you that needs their support. When your employer tries to fuck you over and you cry for help, who will listen to you and support you. We must stick together.
If you were going to choose some really powerful Ex-ministers you really wouldn’t go for Hoon, Hewitt and Byers would you? I mean, they were all pretty useless, I looking specifically at you Patricia Hewitt, as Ministers.
It seems they have claimed that they can manipulate Government policy in return for money. There seems to be little doubt that they said it but these lobbyists clearly don't know that much about British politics if they think that these 3 have any real influence. To be honest I didn't know that they were still MPs so quiet have they been. Oh but there was that short lived plot thing that they tried earlier in the year.
Why are we so surprised that they have turned out to be self-serving, money grabbing tossers? They had already tried to shaft the Party early this year, they aren't good Party people.
What I like about this story is the fact that people are getting so worked up about this, it's sweet. It's nice that we still get so worked up about minor political scandals. In the US, for instance, this is how their law making actually works. My point being that our politics is actually relatively clean, but we must carry on being vigilant and getting stroppy about it so that it doesn't get any worse.
Dorset really doesn't get into the news that so it's nice when it does, although when it does can you please print a picture of the right place please (no, that is Gold's Hill in Shaftsbury not Maiden Castle) or the locals are behaving like, well, locals or extras from Brasseye.
This week Dorset County Museum Dorchester has won its battle to save a collection of play scripts and stage set models by Thomas Hardy. They were collected by one of the original Hardy Players between 1908 and 1924 and the Museum has been trying to raise about £60,000 in order to buy them and stop them being taken out of the Country. They should stay here, Dorchester is the home of Hardy, or least that’s what we tell the American Tourists.
If I ever start another “bit” on here with the phrase “A survey says”, or similar, you have the right to poke me in the eye because this will make me as lazy as the journalist that copy and pasted it from the press release in the first place.
I know that those who write for our papers are over worked, I have heard that they have to write 4 times as much stuff, I believe the correct term is copy, as they had to 20 years ago, but, never the less, printing everything that PR companies E-mail you is just lazy.
Take this “study” from the Daily Mail a few weeks ago. It is about eggs. It is claiming that the humble egg is a “superfood” (there is a term I could do with never hearing again) but do you know who it is sponsored by? Look there, right down at the bottom. Yes, there it is, the money has come from the totally dispassionate and completely neutral British Egg Industry Council. No, I didn’t know that they eggisted either. Ah hahaha, egg pun! It’s not a “study”, it’s an advert.
And then we had the Sun giving us a sex survery on Friday. Have a look at the slide show on the webite here and see if you can work out who it is advertising, I mean sponsored by. Now there are plenty of problems with it as a survery but basically, it's an advert.
The essential problem with this sort of “story” is that some people don't read down to the end of paragraph 4 or 5 to see who has paid for the article and they take it as at face value and as a proper survey, resulting in them being massively ill-informed.
Whilst this isn't too much of a problem because most of these “surveys” are about pointless things there is a drip, drip effect. One day they are telling you that coffee is good for you and the next that it is bad. This ends up with people not taking any notice of proper dietry or medical advice because they think that “scientists” are always changing their minds, that they don't know what they are on about. No they are not. PR companies are trying to sell you stuff and newspapers are making it easy for them.
Let's have some awards of the week because I've got things to do,
The Award for Looking Fantastic of the Week,
It's time for another one of those staggering admissions that I make from time to time. I think that Lady Gaga is fantastic. There, I've said. I don't care for her music, although Bad Romance was alright, no, what I like is the fact that when a stylist says to her “I've got this idea, do you want to give it a go?”, she says “Yes, yes I will”. She will wear absolutely anything and take it very seriously. This I like. See, for instance (as long as you are over 16, it's a little saucy and they do kill quite a lot of people), the video for her new single “Telephone” in which she wears, at one point, an outfit made out of “Police, do not cross” tape and in another scene has Coke cans as rollers in her hair. If you can't get on to YouTube because you have an old browser that won't automatically update and you are using Linux and are not sure how to do it manually (only me then?) then you can always look at the Daily Mail website (although I wouldn't recommend it, it will just annoy you.) which seems to be on a commission from Gaga's PR company as they seem to print at least one picture of her every day.
It seems that I am not alone in my enjoyment of her style as Lady Gaga has now had over a billion hits on You Tube. Now that is quite a lot. I was really happy when my posting about “You and Yours” in the week was linked to by Ben Goldacre and I got an awful lot more hits than usual, can you imagine how happy I'd be if I got a billion hits?
The Award for Some Pretty Top Architecture,
Ladies and Gentleman I give you Le Centre Pompidou-Metz. It has been built in Metz in France and will be opened on the 10th of May. It's propose is mostly as an exhibition space but I don't really care about that, see what it looks like,
Now that is what a modern building should look like.
Now I'm not saying that all the Tea Baggers, sorry, Partiers are tiny minded, racist fuckwits, that would be unfair and I don't want to tar all those nice people with the same brush, but if you don't condemn it then you condone it. Is that what they want?
You may remember that last week I tried to start my own religion (sort of) in order so that we could claim that absolutely anything could be claimed to be a tenet of the religion. Well now we have progress. We had a bit on the Pod Delusion podcast (which is embedded just on the left there, I am right at the end, after the credits), we have a website and shop, a facebook group and a Facebook fan thing. Go on, go and see them all.
I hope you all have a lovely week.
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